


Licks its red talons clean

by Vaznetti



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: ASoIaF Kink Meme, Future Fic, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-24
Updated: 2012-05-24
Packaged: 2017-11-05 23:13:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,438
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vaznetti/pseuds/Vaznetti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What do you call thirty-seven dead Freys?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Licks its red talons clean

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt, when they combine their talents, they set whole kingdoms ablaze.

Harrenhal was a great ruin, but she told Arya that it was hers; it was almost true, Sansa thought. It was Alayne's if it was anyone's, and she had been Alayne. Arya seemed to know the place, and was willing to stay there before they moved North. They had agreed on that: they would go north to Winterfell. They would go home.

First they had to get through the Riverlands and past the Twins, then through the Neck and up the Kingsroad. Snow lay on it higher than a horse, they had heard, but Arya said that wolves were good at running over snow. She didn't want to wait until spring, and Sansa had agreed.

"We'll need supplies, though," she said. "We'll need something to eat." There was not much in Harrenhal, or anywhere in the Riverlands; the last harvests had been poor, and the stores had been taken by soldiers. There was a little grain left in the castle store-rooms, and Arya's wolves left meat for them when they could, but that was not enough to see them home.

"There's food at the Twins," Arya said. "No one sacked _them_."

Sansa heard what she didn't say: the Freys didn't deserve their unburned castle, their full cellars. Not after what they'd done. "You can't just walk in and kill all the Freys," she said. 

"We could," Arya said. It didn't sound like her old sullen argument, or like boasting. "We could kill everyone in the castle."

Sansa listened.

* 

Two more kitchen maids were welcome at the Twins; the castle was said to be haunted by the Northern dead, and servants didn't stay long any more despite the hard winter outside the walls. The girls were quiet, and looked after each other, as one of the stable boys discovered when he tried his luck with the older one. She had her eye on getting one of the Lord's get, they agreed, and spat into the snow. And why not, one of the older grooms said. No one else was offering to marry a Frey any more.

They'd best hurry, then, said another. Just look at Ser Whalen now, out yesterday hunting and today in his sickbed with his arm near torn off by his own dogs. Like to die, no doubt. And last week Martyn Rivers got an arrow through his eye.

They spat again.

*

It was late before the kitchens were truly quiet; while the scullery maids finished scrubbing the others sat around and told ghost stories. The new girls listened with big eyes, and the younger one kept asking for more. 

"…you can see him if you go up to the Hall at midnight," a cook told them, "sitting on his seat, wolf's head and all."

"Stop it!" the older one said, her face pale. "Nan, stop it!"

"They're only stories, Alayne. They can't hurt you." But the older girl got up and went off to sleep, and Nan followed her. "There's no one there," she said when they lay beside each other, curled up on their cot. "I was up there last night, and there weren't any ghosts."

"Just you," said Alayne.

Nan twisted around to face her. "I'm not the only ghost here. Is there a way to wash the dye out of your hair?"

* 

They had been working all day in the kitchen, preparing for the feast: the Lord of the Crossing was celebrating his ninety-sixth name-day, and as many of his descendants as could had come to see him celebrate. The Great Hall was packed and Alayne had to squeeze through the tables, bearing platters and jugs. She twisted away when one of the grandsons (an Emmon, she thought) tried to pinch her bottom, casually knocking his head with the pitcher of wine as she placed it on the table. The other men at the table laughed, but she had already moved on. Her arms and feet ached, and her teeth were clenched against the shrill singing of the minstrels, but it wouldn't be long now.

Nan was at the door as well when she got there, coming in with a platter heaped with venison. They bumped into each other as they passed, and the platter seemed to slide out of Nan's hands: there was a crush at the door as some servants came to cuff Nan around the head for her clumsiness and others to help them clean up. "Go," Nan whispered to her as she pushed the bloody meat back on. Alayne stood and started back down to the kitchens, but she turned to look as, with a groan and a crash, one of the tapestries fell free from the wall. It knocked some torches out of their sconces and landed on one of the trestle tables, trapping the feasters beneath it and catching fire. Then another went, and another. Her sister, still crouched in the doorway, gestured at her, and she turned and ran.

The musicians had stopped playing, and screams had taken their place.

*

The fire didn't kill the Lord of the Crossing: he and his wife had been bundled out the back of the Hall and across the bridge to the other tower. But he lay in his bed, breathing shallowly and coughing from the smoke. The whole castle stank of it: the Hall had burned for a night and most of a day, and they had only started to count the number of the dead. Many who might have escaped were killed when the one of the hall doors had come off its hinges and blocked the exit. If two kitchen maids had been crushed or burned in the chaos, no one missed them yet. 

They were hiding in the maester's quarters. It was logical enough, since he could not leave Walder Frey's bedside, and Arya, in her nightly explorations, had found the hidden room he used for his poisons and secret papers. Sansa read them as her hair dried, and Arya sorted through his herbs and sharpened Needle. They wrapped Sansa's hair in a scarf to hide it during the short walk to the Lord's rooms, and Arya powdered her face to make it paler. 

There was a boy outside Walder Frey's door. "You can't go in there," he said.

"The maester asked us to help," said Sansa.

"No he didn't," the boy said. He was abut Arya's age, Sansa thought. "If he had wanted anything he would have sent me, but he hasn't come out for hours. I'm Elmar Frey, and I say you can't go in there." And he drew breath again, but before he could call for help or say anything further, Arya had pulled out Needle and stabbed him through the heart.

He stared down at the blood on his chest, and coughed blood from his mouth. "I'm Arya Stark," Arya said, "and I say we can."

They dragged the boy inside the room together; there was nothing to be done about the blood on the floor, but they weren't planning to linger. Arya stabbed the maester as well -- he wasn't a Frey, they had agreed, but he served them -- while the boy's last breaths gurgled and rattled and Walder Frey struggled to sit up in his bed.

Sansa unwound the scarf from her hair and shrugged off the tray cloak she'd been wearing. Underneath was a bright blue dress they had stolen from the laundry, which made her hair redder and her face whiter. "You…" Frey managed, and "…throat."

"Yes," Sansa said, loud and clear, with all the confidence she remembered in her mother. "You cut my throat. You killed my son and his bannermen." She took out her own knife and stood by the bedside. His skin was pale and wrinkled; there was drool in the corner of his mouth and a stale smell rising from his bed. "I've burned your hall and your children." She raised the knife. "Now I'm going to kill you too."

"Cat-" he started to say, as she twisted one hand in his thin hair to hold his head back, and slit his throat. As she watched the blood flow out onto the blankets, Sansa wondered briefly whether every man she killed would confuse her with her mother.

*

There was a commotion behind them as they led their horses out of the North Gate of the Twins. Arya turned to look back. "They found him," she said. But there was no one to come for them, no one to know they were missing. Snow was already falling. It would cover their tracks, and outside the wolves were howling. It was time to go home.

end


End file.
